Scroogle is once again offline after Google made yet another change to the auxiliary web interface the not-for-profit uses to serve up a privacy-friendly version of Mountain View's search engine.
"Here we go again," Scroogle founder Daniel Brandt says in a post to the site. "We regret to announce that Google changed their …

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Yes

@MacRat: Fail indeed

Because scroogle is not "some random website." Scroogle is probably the best known, long established Google scraper. It also makes a strong point of being a non-commercial protest/public interest site regarding individual privacy on the Internet. Whether you think they are completely full of themselves or not, they are far more relevant than "some random website."

My word...

Plugins

I think many people use the plugin for Firefox (or search bar from Opera) to access Scroogle. I think its show of results are easy to read, pretty much plain test, and no rubbish cluttering the screen. But personal preference seldom counts for much these days (did it every?)

It could be much worse

I don't like Google's model but it is undeniable that they put an awful lot behind delivering their search results. If others want to write their own search engines, build their own service to a different model, then that's their choice but scraping is a somewhat questionable practice at best.

I don't particularly like it when I find my own site's contents simply copied and hosted elsewhere when it's not licensed for that and I suspect most wouldn't either.

Google could make life really difficult for scrapers if they put their mind to it so the real story is perhaps that they seem to have been so tolerant of it, and the background to why that might be.

Startingpage

Probably a coincidence

About the same time scroogle went down again (Tuesday-ish) my employer's web filter blocked access to it. It is in the category "Anonymizer Services" and is therefore inappropriate for me to use at work. That's fine, I'll just use regular ol' google now and they can retain all the records they want on what I search for. My browser appears to be coming from corporate HQ three states away anyway. I am using the SSL version at least so my employer can't see my search terms.

Yes, I'm aware of ixquick, duckduckgo, clusty, etc. I tried all of them the last few times scroogle went titsup and found their results wanting.

So,

Dodgy Scroogle hating going on

There are some unusual comments here - I wonder where they could be coming from. Somewhere with a good panorama over the peaks perhaps? Scroogle has, for a long time, provided a great search alternative for those of us who despise Google's insatiable manic desire for data collection and mining. And a facelift? Oh, do be brief. Use Scroogle SSL in FF's search box and you never even get to see the home page, just the clean and useful results it produces.

Of course it all comes down to personal preference. If you don't care about your privacy, use Google. If you do, use another search engine with a good privacy policy, or use a service like Scroogle.

Hold still, damn you

Bloat

Google won the search engine war because it was lean, mean and focussed. OK they've got no responsibility whatsoever towards Scroogle but IMO it's a sign that they're getting fat, just like all the other new contenders do eventually.

So who's lining up to take the crown? Bing? Someone else? A rejuvenated Altavista?

New owners?

Daniel doesn't sound very keen about keeping this service running anymore. I wonder if somebody else would be willing to take it over. A trusted authority like the EFF maybe?

Interestingly, DDG no longer seems to require JavaScript. I might try them out now:

https://duckduckgo.com/

Their privacy policy is superb: https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html - They don't log IP addresses or User Agents, they have a Tor onion address, and they even go out of their way to prevent search terms leaking to the destination site via referers...

Title

Could someone please enlighten me as to the motivation for using services like this?

You don't like Google, so why not just use Bing, Yahoo or whoever you *do* like?

Or, maybe you like Google but don't like the idea that they are retaining information about you to be used for future ad targetting etc? Surely that is the contract that you enter with Google - you get to use their search engine and information about you is the cost of entry. After all, everyone knows there's no such thing as a free lunch.

In either case I'm afraid I don't have any sympathy for Scrooglers.

On a higher note, using Kant's Categorical Imperative, if everyone used Scroogle then Google's search service would die, meaning nobody could use Scroogle. Ergo using Scroogle is ethically bad :-)

Doctor vs Kant

That logic doesn't work. If there's a good reason for everyone to become a doctor now and the training is available, there is absolutely no reason for that to stop in future. We don't stop funding for childrens' education just because they all go to school.